Michel Serres

The son of a barge man, Serres entered France's naval academy, the >École Navale, in 1949 and the ">École Normale Supérieure in 1952. He >aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968, and began teaching in Paris.

As a child, Serres witnessed firsthand the violence and devastation of war. "I was six for my first dead bodies," he told Bruno Latour. These formative experiences led him consistently to eschew scholarship based upon models of war, suspicion, and criticism.

Over the next twenty years, Serres earned a reputation as a spell-binding lecturer and as the author of remarkably beautiful and enigmatic prose so reliant on the sonorities of